Reading Matters

'Are you Somebody?' by Nuala O'Faolain

Non-fiction - paperback; New Island Books (2nd edition); 264 pages; 2008.

I've read some extraordinary memoirs in recent years, all by professional writers -- Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, Amélie Nothomb's The Life of Hunger -- and this one, by Irish author, journalist and TV producer Nuala O'Faolain, is right up there with the best of them.

O'Faolain, who died last year aged 68 from cancer, was a household name in Ireland. Indeed, in the introduction to this edition, she writes that she was "fairly well known" but is quick to point out that she was "no star":

People have to look at me twice or three times to put a name on me. Sometimes when I'm drinking in a lounge bar, a group of women, say, across the room begin to look at me, and send one of their number over to me, or when I'm in the supermarket someone who has just passed me by turns back, and comes right up to me and scrutinises my face. 'Are you somebody?' they ask.

By contrast, I know very little about O'Faolain outside of her wonderful novel My Dream of You, which I read earlier in the year and had been told was a thinly veiled biography. Having enjoyed it so much I figured I should try the "real" thing, which is how I came to read this memoir.

There's no doubt that O'Faolain knows how to write. There's also no doubt that she knows how to do so in a very candid way. There's no hedging her bets, or taking a softly-softly approach. It's all here, warts and all.

She was born one of nine children in 1940 "when nine was not even thought of as a big family among the teeming, penniless, anonymous Irish of the day". She viewed herself as a nobody, just an ordinary girl, in a country constricted by Catholicism, who would eventually be married and kept by a man. And yet, for most of Nuala's life, she rages against this stereotypical expectation and breaks as many social norms as she can.

Without going into too much detail, she moves in with a man she has not married (a huge no-no in Holy Catholic Ireland at the time) and later flees to England, where she forges a hugely successful academic and journalistic career. But along the way, despite her successful working life, there is something missing: a troubled past and estranged relationship with her family seems to keep her back (her father, a well-known Irish journalist, does not come off very well in this memoir, nor her mother, who turned to drink to numb the pain of a bad marriage). And then there's her promiscuity and search for "passion" which ultimately leaves her feeling rather lost and empty.

Surprisingly, for a woman so candid about her sexual desires, she gives scant regard to her partner of 15 years, the journalist Nell McCafferty and barely mentions her in this book, apart from describing the odd cosy holiday together. (Perhaps Nuala's second volume, entitled Almost There, may fill in some of these gaps.)

Are You Somebody? is about one woman's search for meaning, dealing with a past that you cannot leave behind and coming to terms with growing old. There's a sadness at the heart of this memoir, and a slow-burning rage, too, and perhaps just a smidgen of self-pity. But, ultimately, it's a powerhouse of a read, and you come away from it feeling as if you really got to know the lonely, flawed and hugely intelligent and brave woman who wrote it.

'Books v. cigarettes' by George Orwell

Non-fiction - paperback; Penguin; 144 pages; 2008.

Books v. cigarettes is a small collection of essays by George Orwell brought together as part of Penguin's Great Ideas Series 3. The title of the book comes from an essay of the same name in which Orwell considers how much money he spends on his two vices, reading and smoking. This particular essay, first published in the Tribune on 8 February, 1946, will resonate with book lovers the world over, because how many of us have foregone some other pleasure (or necessity) in favour of a good book?

To prove that reading is not an expensive hobby out of the reach of ordinary citizens, Orwell counts all the books he owns (this sounds remarkably like what I have done in recent weeks, tackling my TBR piles) and adds up their total price to work out how much money he has spent on reading over a 15-year period. He discovers he has some 900 books and that it has cost him a little over £11 per year. 

He also includes his newspaper and periodicals intake, which is quite impressive: £8 per year on "two daily papers, one evening paper, two Sunday papers, one weekly review and one or two monthly magazines".  (I suspect if Orwell was around today he'd be a complete internet junkie, reading all the news sites, book blogs, Twitter feeds and so on.) He also spends roughly £6 per year on library subscriptions and cheap paperbacks, chiefly Penguins, "which one buys and then loses or throws away". 

All up, he estimates reading costs him £25 per year, which, according to this calculator, is the equivalent of £648 in today's money. By comparison, he spends £20 a year on cigarettes and beer.

In the grand scheme of things, he thinks this is quite reasonable although he points out that it is difficult to establish "any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them".

His second essay, Bookshop Memories, recalls his time spent working in a second-hand bookshop. His observations are both slightly snobby ("I doubt whether 10 per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one") and acutely funny:

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who 'wants a book for an invalid' (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover.

This quote made me laugh out loud, because I spent six years working in bookshops and used to get vague requests like this all the time!

Books v. cigarettes also includes a wonderful essay about reviewing books and another on the state of literature, which will appeal to bibliophiles. The rest of this slim volume tackles other non-bookish subjects: patriotism, the relationship between doctors and patients, and Orwell's childhood memoirs spent at an exclusive boarding school for which he obtained a scholarship.

All up, this is a perfect, effortless read, highly personable and quite bookish, if you like that sort of thing.

'Coming Up for Air' by George Orwell

 

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 256 pages; 2001.

George Orwell wrote Coming Up for Air in 1939, a decade before his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's a strange, beguiling and quite humorous novel, but there's a dark undertone that sums up the time period in which it was written, as Britain hovered on the edge of war.

The story, which is commonly thought to be thinly veiled autobiography, is narrated by George Bowling, a 45-year-old married man with two children who's bored with his life as an insurance salesman. He lives in the "inner-outer suburbs" in one of those streets that looks like every other, comprising a long, long row of "little semi-detached houses as much like council houses but generally uglier". He's just had a new set of false teeth fitted and his waistline is expanding at an alarming rate. Hmmm, sounds charming, doesn't he?

With the country on the brink of war and bombing planes flying low overhead, George retreats into the world of nostalgia and spends most of the novel recalling his semi-idyllic childhood in a village outside of London. He gets so lost in this reverie, where he no longer has to worry about the 9-to-5 treadmill and his dreary commute, that he hits upon an idea: he'll take a secret holiday, sans kids and wife, to the village he grew up in to soak up that wonderful, happy atmosphere once again. But in the heat of the moment he forgets one important thing: the march of progress and its impact on the rural way of life he longs to revisit so keenly. What he finds when he arrives isn't quite what he expected...

If nothing else, Coming Up for Air pays homage to English country life at the turn of the 19th century and the ways in which little boys grew up, carefree and obsessed by egg-collecting, fishing and other wildlife pursuits, before the horrors of the First World War changed things forever.

But the most interesting aspect of this novel is seeing the seeds of Nineteen Eighty-Four buried in the narrative. For instance, before George escapes to the village of his childhood, he's fearful of the current political climate -- "Hitler, Stalin, bombs, machine-guns, rubber truncheons, Rome-Berlin axis, Popular Front, anti-Comintern pact" -- even though he believes no one else is much bothered.

I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.

When he attends a lecture in the local hall with his wife and her female companions (remember, this is in the days before TV and such lectures were common entertainment), he feels slightly detached from the speaker who, predictably, pitches "into Hitler and the Nazis". But for anyone who's read Nineteen Eighty-Four the following sounds very much like the germ of the idea of the "two minutes hate":

A rather mean little man, with a white face and a bald-head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. Whats he doing? Quite deliberately, and quite openly, he's stirring up hatred. [...] He means it. Not faking at all -- feels every word he's saying. He's trying to work up hatred in the audience, but that's nothing to the hatred he feels himself. Every slogan's gospel truth to him. If you cut him open all you'd find inside would be Democracy-Fascism-Democracy.

But the book's not entirely humourless, because even if the narrator's not exactly likable, he does have a habit of taking the mickey out of himself and others. Here he describes the audience members at the lecture:

...a little woman with red hair was knitting a jumper. One plain, two purl, drop one and knit two together. The lecturer was describing how the Nazis chop people's heads off for treason and sometimes the executioner makes a bosh shot. There was another woman in the audience, a girl with dark hair, one of the teachers at the School Council, really listening, sitting forward with her big round eyes fixed on the lecturer and her mouth a little bit open, drinking it all in.

On the whole, though, this is a rather pessimistic novel about a man trying to come to terms with a lost Edwardian childhood while a war with Germany looms large on the horizon.

'Everyone's Got a Bono Story' by Anne-Marie O'Connor

 

Fiction - paperback; Tivoli; 352 pages; 2004.

If you ever needed proof that I have rather eclectic reading tastes, then this review coming directly after W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four should do it. Admittedly, I read Everyone's Got A Bono Story on my sick bed; my mind couldn't settle on anything and I was looking for something completely fluffy, something that wouldn't tax my brain and would be as easy to read as a knife slicing through soft butter. This book, the first by Anne-Marie O'Connor, fit the bill perfectly.

It's set in Dublin where everyone has a story to recount about Bono, the lead singer of U2. Perhaps they've seen him drinking in a bar, maybe a cousin went to school with him, or a friend of a friend once delivered him a pizza. But Aoife Collins, a 20-something office manager who has dreams of becoming a fashion designer, hasn't got a story to relate. When she loses her job and is evicted from her flat, all in the same week, her lack of a Bono tale seems the least of her worries. Then her best friend, Rory, throws down the gauntlet: if she can engineer her own encounter with Bono he will give her 5,000 euros.

You see where this is going, right? Okay, the story is as cheesy as the cover image, and the whole premise is just ridiculous, but it's a very witty read. Part of the joy of reading Everyone's Got a Bono Story is following Aoife's exploits as she tries lots of different ways to meet the man himself, including dressing up as a nun and knocking on his front door. There's certainly an element of farce to it, and I'm surprised no-one's actually made it into a film -- it'd be a riot.

O'Connor fleshes out the narrative by giving both Aoife and Rory complicated parental relationships: Rory's dad is super-rich but oblivious to Rory's homosexuality; and Aoife's mother just wants her daughter to return to rural Kerry, where she can settle down with a nice man, rather than running amok in the city.

Of course, there's the obligatory romantic liaison for Aoife, which doesn't go according to plan, and a similar amount of angst about her career, because she just lacks the confidence to do what she really wants to do.

There's no surprises in the rather predicable plot, which ends on a rather happy note for all involved (including Aoife's mother), but this is a light-hearted read, perfect for those times when you fancy a giggle.

'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 352 pages; 2004.

How do you review a book that is a true 20th Century classic like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four without simply regurgitating all that has been said before? Is there really anything more I can add to the mix? Probably not, but that won't stop me telling you just a little about this brilliant dystopian novel, first publishing in 1949, and why I love it so much.

For those of you who have never read Orwell's masterpiece (a term I don't use lightly), it's set in London in 1984. The city, which belongs to one of the world's three superstates, is under Totalitarian rule and at perpetual war. Everyone lives under the watchful eye of Big Brother, children are encouraged to spy against their parents, and to even think "bad" thoughts is considered a crime.

Winston Smith, the narrator, works for the Ministry of Truth, rewriting Times articles so that the ruling Party's version of history, which changes on a daily basis, is always correct. But Winston is not like everyone else and considers that the continual surveillance and collective world view is oppressive and stifles individuality. He's also alarmed by the number of people who are "disappeared" and re-written out of history because they haven't toed the Party line.

When he meets the intriguing Julia and begins an illicit romance with her, he discovers that he is not the only secret "rebel". But this liaison does not escape the Thought Police and Winston is thrown into prison, where the "secrets" of the Party are finally revealed to him.

I first read this book circa 1994 when I was studying journalism and I remember, quite clearly, the oppression resonating off the page. It was a dark, incredibly thought-provoking story, and with every turn of the page I could feel my whole world view being challenged on very many different levels: was history a true record of the past? was the news media so corrupt? were wars just a means to stimulate the economy and keep people in jobs? were the enemies of the West just a conspiracy invented to keep us living in fear?

Fast forward 15 years and I re-read the book as part of my book group last month. This time 'round, my brain, having already grappled with these new and alarming concepts, now concentrated on whether Orwell's "predictions" had come true. And because I was less caught up in the overwhelming brilliance of the book's scope and vision, I enjoyed the narrative, which is quite fast-paced, and the eloquence of the prose, which is sparse without ever becoming boring.

The thing that struck me most, however, was how much of this futuristic novel was deeply rooted in the time in which Orwell wrote it. There are echoes of war-torn London throughout this book, not the least in the following passage:

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat.

Obviously there's a lot of stuff that feels incredibly prescient today: the so-called War on Terror and its resultant erosion of civil liberties; the increasing reliance on media spin, particularly by government agencies; and the ever-present CCTV surveillance, especially here in the UK (in 2006, there was one CCTV camera for every 14 people).

By contrast, Orwell's prediction that the future would be sexless didn't quite come off, and even the notion that you only had to alter The Times newspaper to rewrite history seems laughable given today's preponderance of media outlets and formats, including the internet and mobile phone technology.

But, on the whole, this is a remarkable book, a kind of warning shot from the past, that still resonates and which will continue to resonate long into the future. If you've never read this book, I urge you to do so, and even if you have, it's worth revisiting just to re-experience Orwell's amazing vision.

For a rather wonderful breakdown of the novel, including explanations of the terminology, visit the wikipedia entry.

----

This book was chosen by Gemma as part of our London-based face-to-face book group. Here's some other posts written about the book by fellow members:

• Claire's review

• Simon's review

'Not Untrue & Not Unkind' by Ed O'Loughlin

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 288 pages; 2009.

The 2009 Booker shortlist gets announced this coming Tuesday, so I thought it was about time I reviewed one of the long-listed titles -- Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind. I read it more than a month ago now but haven't been able to muster up enough will power to review it because, to be perfectly honest, I found this an incredibly disappointing book.

I actually bought it long before the long-list was announced, having spied it at Dublin Airport back in mid-April. I was attracted by the story of a foreign correspondent working in Africa and liked the fact that O'Loughlin was a former foreign correspondent himself, so would no doubt know what he was talking about in the novel. Anne Enright's coverline describing it as "the most exciting first novel I have read in many years" sealed the deal.

The story opens with Dublin-based journalist Owen Simmons riffling through the papers of a dead colleague and discovering a photograph that makes him reflect on his time, 10 years earlier, as a foreign correspondent in Africa. He then recounts an endless succession of events -- genocide, war, corruption -- that wouldn't be out of place in Evelyn Waugh's delicious satire about journalism, Scoop but that's about where the similarities end.

Instead of delivering a novel about those fascinating news events O'Laughlin chooses to focus the story on the people covering those events, so what we get is a kind of dry account of the camaraderie between an eclectic mix of foreign correspondents, freelancers and photographers. All of these people face enormous news-gathering challenges and experience some incredibly disturbing situations, but this tends to take a back seat to shifting love affairs and petty rivalries.

This would be perfectly fine if any of those characters were remotely interesting, but I found most of them dull, shallowly drawn and, occasionally, morally dubious.

Sadly, the narrative suffers from a lack of drive, and the only time I felt it getting exciting -- when a reporter, getting worn down by the news cycle, goes off the rails in his bedroom and throws a gorilla doll out the window in a fit of blind fury -- it slides back into its normal plodding pace, with journos lolling around hotel pools or boozing up in hotel bars waiting for the next story to break.

What this all amounts to is a story that lacks emotion, which is difficult to square given the fact it's set during some of the most devastating and violent conflicts in recent times. This is such a shame, because the book had all the right ingredients for a really powerful, hard-hitting and devastating read and what you get is something as dreary as watching grass grow.

Despite this, it's clear that O'Laughlin can write: his prose style is clear and direct, and when he describes the landscape he really comes into his own, as the following passage demonstrates:

The wind chased us to the edge of town and there it halted. It was the strangest thing. Looking back, I could see a brown spire rising over the hills and rooftops, flecked with shreds of paper and plastic, and dust devils played like stray children on the scrub at the edge of town. But ahead of us the hot vacant road shimmered in the sun and there was no wind to trouble the massive indifference of the bush.

But beautiful writing isn't enough when the story you're telling lacks oomph. The only saving grace is the twist at the end, when Owen realises that sometimes your past can come back to haunt you...

'Netherland' by Joseph O'Neill

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial; 248 pages; 2009.

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland was famously long-listed for last year's Man Booker Prize, attracting a flurry of support from mainly North American critics who loved the cricket element of the book. (The Vulture section of the New York Times has quite a good summary of the acclaim it garnered upon release. And President Obama also turned out to be a fan. )

But on the other side of the pond the response was more mixed. And if you dare check the Amazon.co.uk reviews you'll see the broad spectrum of views it's attracted which range from glowing five-star accounts to less-than-complimentary one-star assessments.

Thinking that the novel was about cricket, I picked it up at the start of the Ashes series last month hoping to get myself in the mood for a summer of competitive sport between two old rivals, Australia (my homeland) and England (where I now reside). Six weeks on, the five-match series is now at level pegging and the deciding final match will be played this coming Thursday, so what better time to review the book?

While Netherland could be regarded as a paean to cricket, this is not a novel about cricket. This is a novel about what it is like to be an outsider and living in the fringes, or as O'Neill's apt title suggests, in a state of being neither here nor there -- the netherland.

For while the protagonist, Hans van den Broek, chooses cricket as his refuge, there's a lot more going on here than the "gentleman of sport". Hans is an immigrant -- Dutch-born but educated in Britain and now residing in Manhattan, with his wife and young son. He's desperate to fit in and goes through the whole rigmarole of gaining his US drivers' license, if only to become that little bit more embedded in the culture. Connecting with people who play cricket in New York is yet another way he can "connect", albeit with an immigrant underclass. And, tellingly, the one man with whom he forges a tentative friendship, Chuck Ramkissoon, winds up being pulled out of a New York canal with his hands tied behind his back. (Note, this isn't a plot spoiler: O'Neill reveals this fact up front and much of the novel is about Hans recalling his relationship with Chuck, trying to pinpoint what it is about that man that could have resulted in someone wanting to murder him.)

Netherland has also been described as a post-9/11 novel, but again, this label has been slightly misconstrued. While the book reflects the kind of "netherland" residents in Manhattan might have felt in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, a kind of eerie state of no longer feeling comfortable in their homes, this isn't the sole premise of the book. O'Neill uses it as a vehicle to explain the disintegration of Hans' marriage, for while Hans is content to be "carried along by the dark flow of those times" his wife is not. She no longer feels safe in the city and decides to return to her native England, taking their infant son with her. Hans, unable to commit to such a move, finds himself living a kind of transatlantic lifestyle, dividing his time between New York and London. Again, it's a netherland existence, neither a New Yorker, nor a Londoner; neither a married man, nor a bachelor.

Ironically, having read this book, I, too, felt kind of ambivalent about it, not quite sure if I loved or loathed it. I finished it maybe a month ago but simply haven't had the time to review it, but strangely, with the passing of time, the story has coalesced in my brain and I've found myself thinking about certain elements. I wonder now what was holding Hans back, why he was passive on so many different fronts -- his friendship with Chuck, who clearly had a lot of dodgy things happening in his life; and his foundering marriage -- and let events wash over him without really taking any action himself. Was it a psychological netherland that constrained him, or would that be taking the netherland theme a step too far?

One of things that has stuck in my head is the sense of belonging Hans achieved by playing cricket in New York, even though some of his fellow sportsmen could not speak English and he refused to adapt his batting style to the "American way" which meant "the baseball-like business of slugging and hoisting". I loved that each weekend was spent in a van, travelling around the five boroughs, to play a "friendly".

We sat mostly silent in the van, absorbed into the moodiness that afflicts competitors as they contemplate, or try to put out of their minds, the drama that awaits. What we talked about, when we did talk, was cricket. There was nothing else to discuss. The rest of our lives -- jobs, children, wives, worries -- peeled away, leaving only this fateful sporting fruit.

As an aside, I was watching BBC Newsnight a week or two back which featured a story about the NYPD running a cricket competition to help improve relations with the city's ethnic minorities.  "That sounds just like Joseph O'Neill's Netherland," I told my Other Half, who was watching it with me. Then, lo and behold, the presenter Gavin Esler interviewed, via satellite, O'Neill, who came across as one of the most articulate, gentlemanly and genuine author interviews I've ever seen. You can watch it here. It was enough to make me want to read more of his work, so if you've read any of this other titles, I'd love to hear your thoughts...

'My Dream of You' by Nuala O'Faolain

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 464 pages; 2002.

Nuala O'Faolain was an Irish journalist, who died of cancer last year, aged 68. My Dream of You was her critically acclaimed debut novel about a middle-aged woman coming to terms with her past in order to embrace her future. It's one of those big, rambunctious novels that's a bit like an onion, with layer upon layer of meaning to peel back and discover.

It's bawdy and shocking in places, but tempered by good humour throughout. The hugely complicated, multi-layered storyline never feels like hard work. And there's so much going on to provoke and challenge one's own values that I'm sure this book is going to stay with me for a long time to come.

The narrator, Kathleen de Burca, is a highly successful travel writer, who has been the "tenant of a dim basement, half buried at the back of Euston Road, for more than twenty years". When her colleague and best friend Jimmy dies of a heart attack, Kathleen's life seemingly falls apart. She quits her job and returns to her native Ireland for the first time in more than two decades, where she hopes to write a book about a divorce case from history that has long intrigued her.

The Talbot vs Talbot judgement centres on a refined English woman (Mrs Talbot) accused of having an affair with a domestic servant (William Mullan) in 1849 at the height of the Irish potato famine. While undertaking research for the book in rural Ireland (near where the Talbot's once lived), Kathleen finds herself analysing her own life: a 50-year-old spinster who has never settled down with a man, although she has had numerous love affairs and one-night stands.

Estranged from her siblings -- an older sister in New York and a younger brother in Ireland -- she also begins to look back on her family relationships and how they have shaped her personality and tough outlook on life. Her now-dead father was emotionally distant, but it was her mother, who suffered from depression and later died of cancer, with whom she struggled to understand the most.

The book interleaves these very different narrative threads together into one seamless whole. It is so ripe with meaning, you could read My Dream of You ten times and still not get to the bottom of everything buried here.

One of the big themes that runs throughout this remarkably readable novel is sexual love versus romantic love and how Kathleen's "life would be marked by my misunderstanding of passion". It is clear from the outset that Kathleen does not feel she deserves to be loved, which is why she never turns a man down when he asks for sex. But whom to blame for this attitude?

I explained what happened in different ways to myself at different times in my life. My availability, I'd call it, rather than promiscuity, was Daddy's fault for not loving me, or Mammy's fault for having sex with Daddy when they never even talked to each other, or both their faults for showing me no other version of closeness between a man and a woman except sexual closeness. It was Catholic Ireland's fault, for sending me out into the world without a shred of inner moral sense, and it was England's fault, for making me feel inferior and unwelcome except when someone wanted to fuck me. It was the fault of the 1960s, for inventing the pill and the miniskirt; and it was also the fault of history, for making a world in which everyone had to pretend to bow to the bourgeois ideal of fidelity.

There are other themes, too, not the least of which is what it was like to be Irish living in London at the height of the IRA's bombing campaign. At one point, Kathleen recalls an incident in which she was doing a piece on 'Hidden Beauties of the Peak District' for the magazine when she returned to the hotel and found the police waiting for her.  They asked her to open her bag, which was sitting on a packing case in a garage, and then told her to take the battery out of her travelling alarm clock.

Sorry about that, the senior policeman said. They don't get many Irish around here.
It was nothing, that little episode. It didn't take five minutes. They had every right to do it. But for a long time afterwards I thought, they could have set me up! God knows it had happened to other Irish people...
I learned to ask for things -- a meal, a drink, directions to a place -- in a low voice and as neutral an accent as I could manage. I learned to look up at the television -- at the pictures of tape across driveways, shoppers staggering forward with blood on their faces, white ambulances screaming around the curves of quiet housing estates -- with no expression on my face. And to read my newspaper, and smile at everyone, and say nothing noticeable.

But at the very heart of the novel is Kathleen's acceptance of herself as a good person who deserves to be happy without society judging her for it. When she meets the charming Shay, a man with whom she feels a deep affinity, the promise of a secure, loving relationship, albeit it with strings attached, beckons -- but at what price?

'Lullabies for Little Criminals' by Heather O'Neill

Fiction - paperback; Quercus; 384 pages; 2008.

Quercus may be my new favourite publisher. In recent months I have read several books -- Nefertiti, The Tenderness of Wolves and Bad Debts -- published by this burgeoning publishing house based in London, and so when Lullabies for Little Criminals landed in my mailbox this week -- the result of a mid-week "trolley dash" around Amazon.co.uk -- I decided to bump it right to the top of my incredibly long reading queue.

Despite being longlisted for this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Lullabies for Little Criminals has received little press attention here in the UK. But in its native Canada it has been critically acclaimed, winning the 2007 Canada Reads, an annual battle of the books competition, as well as the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Best Novel 2007. It  was also shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Awards, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award 2007, the Amazon.ca/ Books in Canada First Novel Award 2007 and  the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal 2007. With such ringing endorsements, I was anxious to see if it lived up to all the hype.

The story follows Baby -- yes, that's her real name -- a streetwise 12-year-old who lives with her widowed father, Jules. Jules is a 26-year-old junkie, who spends most of his time scoring "chocolate milk" -- a euphemism for heroin -- and finding ways to raise the cash to feed his addiction. This means Baby is often left on her own for days at a time, although she still insists on meeting her 9pm curfew because it gives shape to her life.

The pair lead a transient existence, moving from one seedy apartment to another. Baby also does a stint in a foster home (when Jules is hospitalised with tuberculosis) and later she lives with a friendly neighbour (when Jules goes into rehab) -- and all the while she never seems to lose the love for the father whom she adores so much.

Despite the below-the-poverty-line existence, Baby is a bright, resourceful and fearless child who bubbles with optimism. She does well at school and makes friends easily, although her choices sometimes leave a lot to be desired. When she falls under the charms of the local pimp, who grooms her to start turning tricks, not even Baby seems to realise the inherent danger she has put herself in. This is a young girl on the verge of womanhood who simply wants to love and to be loved unaware she is looking for it in all the wrong places.

There's something very wise and honest about this novel, which O'Neill claims is based on some of her own childhood experiences. The prose is incredibly restrained, with not a shred of sentimentality. It's only when the reader adds up the catalogue of incidents and sees the path of destruction that Baby is heading down that any kind of emotion bubbles to the surface: it's unbearably sad, all the more because Baby doesn't realise this.

Initially I doubted the authenticity of the narrator's voice, which sounds too mature and reflective for a 12-year-old. I can only assume that the story is being filtered through adult eyes and that it is being told by a much older Baby looking back on her life. The occasional references to "back then" would support this theory.

The beauty of Lullabies for Little Criminals is that it brings to life in a dry-eyed, matter-of-fact way a world few of us would know. And like the very best literary fiction, it leaves an indelible print on the reader, as if by the very act of reading it your own sheltered world has tilted a little on its axis. This is a universal story that deserves a bigger audience, so I can only hope British (and Australian) readers will fall in love with it as much as our North American counterparts.

'In the Forest' by Edna O'Brien

Fiction - paperback; Phoenix; 273 pages; 2002.

Set in the countryside of western Ireland, this dark, brooding book is based on a real life triple murder in which a man shot dead three people -- a woman, her young child and a priest -- in a forest glade in 1994. But wounds run deep and O'Brien, who wrote the book eight years later, was accused of exploiting a gruesome crime for the sake of a novel and much vilified for her efforts.

With this is mind, I read In the Forest with some trepidation. But I was gripped from the first page and read the book within a matter of days.

It tells the story of Mich O'Kane, a young boy who gets shunted from one institution to another. Devoid of any motherly love he grows into a fearsome individual that the locals call the Kinderschreck -- a kind of monster -- and eventually goes to jail for a serious crime.

Meanwhile Eily Ryan, an unmarried mother, moves to the small town of Cloosh. Here, with her young son Maddy, she sets up home in a remote dilapidated cottage on the edge of the forest, where she can concentrate on her art.

But when O'Kane is released from jail he returns to Cloosh. With no family support and outcast by the locals, he is forced to live in the forest, only appearing in the village when he needs to beg or steal food.

Animal-like in behaviour and thought, he begins stalking Eily. One day, unable to control his sexual fantasies any longer, he abducts Eily and orders her to drive deep into the forest ...

There's no doubt that this book is dark and disturbing. On more than one occasion I felt goosebumps erupt on my skin. But O'Brien never resorts to sensationalism. Her prose is careful, at times clipped, and she moves the story along at an almost annoyingly slow pace, building to the chilling climax slowly but surely.

What I didn't particularly like was the narrative devices she uses. In my opinion the story is told from too many divergent and various sources, sometimes in first person, sometimes in third person. While I understand this was probably O'Brien's attempt to cover all points of view, to demonstrate that the crime was not as straightforward as one might have expected, I thought it hampered the narrative drive.

All in all, In the Forest is an intriguing, atmospheric novel, which is almost Gothic-like in its brooding intensity. Just don't expect to find yourself falling in love with O'Brien's work.

'Personality' by Andrew O'Hagan

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 327 pages; 2003.

Maria Tambini, the daughter of Italian immigrants on the tiny Scottish island of Bute, is destined to be a star. She has an amazing voice that captivates anyone who hears it. At the age of 13, she is discovered by a national TV show, and from there, there is no looking back. But the child star, who hungers for fame and glory, also starves herself and before too long, everything is not as it seems . . .

Overall, I found Personality to be a disappointing story. It never really "grabbed" me and I lost interest before I'd even got a 1/4 way through it.

The critics, however, seem to have loved it.

I can understand that they would appreciate O'Hagan's often lush and descriptive language and his ability to capture time and place. His characterisation is also faultless. But the story was let down by O'Hagan trying to be too clever and experimental in places. The chapters jump all over the place, they go backwards and forwards in time, and are told from a diverse range of viewpoints. Nothing seems to hold it together - apart from the story of Maria's climb to the top and her subsequent freefall to the bottom. But even that isn't enough to keep the reader wanting more.

I think the book is weakened by not hearing from Maria; her story is told by players in her life and we never really get to know what is going on in her head.

And the best part of the story, where one fan, Michael, becomes her lover while another becomes her stalker, comes too late in the book (about 2/3 of the way through). A shame really, because I really enjoyed this part of Personality.

All in all, I thought the story was too fragmented and too multi-layered, and, because of that, it lacked coherence, drive and interest - for this fussy reader anyway.

'Star of the Sea' by Joseph O'Connor

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 410 pages; 2003.

Stunning! A gripping story set on a New York-bound ship filled with hundreds of refugees fleeing the Irish potato famine in 1847. But this is not the usual "Irish potato famine fare" you might expect. It's a complete reworking, not just of the 19th century disaster that was the famine, but of the naval-based novel and, indeed, the novel in general.

O'Connor's tome is incredibly detailed and multi-layered. There are stories within stories, each one marking a different place on the social spectrum: the cunning criminal; the downtrodden maid looking to start a new life; an American journalist who records it all; and a victimised landlord and his unhappy wife. The beauty of O'Connor's magnificent novel is that each of these vastly different characters is inextricably linked in ways that they will never know.

Star of the Sea is a mesmerising tale that will take readers to new, uncharted territory. It is sad, funny, violent, depressing, grim, shameful, shocking and uplifting. O'Connor, the brother of Irish singer Sinead O'Connor, weaves a wonderful, clever narrative together, swinging effortlessly between past and present, on board the ship and in Ireland. But it's the ending which will leave you gasping for more as you suddenly comprehend how all the different strands of the story have come together without you ever realising.

More please.

'The Mammy' by Brendan O'Connell

Fiction - paperback; The O'Brien Press; 174 pages; 1994.

The Mammy is Irish comedian Brendan O'Connell's first book. It's a very simple tale about a widow struggling to raise seven children on Dublin's north side in the late 1960s. Each chapter is essentially a short story centred on the individual characters that make up Agnes Browne's family. There are funny little episodes with not-so-funny punchlines, and the language, studded with 'Dublin-speak', is very stripped back to the point of being boring.

Aside from these faults, it is a lighthearted story — punctuated with pathos — about a family on the wrong side of the tracks, the strength of friendship in trying times, and the essential goodness of people in a more naive era. Apparently the book has been made into a film starring Angelica Houston, and while I haven't seen it, I think it would probably be more entertaining than the novel.